I don't like talking about myself. I'm not really interested in myself. One of the good things about being a supporting actor is that you get to talk about other people.
All actors think every job will be their last.
To see great actors bring it all to life us exhilerating
When I started out I was a failed actor.
Sunday is the Academy Awards. Every time an actor says, 'I didn't expect this,' Ruth Bader Ginsburg will do a shot.
The only lesson I really learned from [Gigi Does It] was that I shouldn't bite off more than I could chew. I've written a bunch of scripts and stuff - every actor has - and that was the first thing that got made.
I'm not sure I enjoyed doing [Gigi Does It]. I'm cool with just being an actor. If anything, I learned to be proud of being an actor.
It's dangerous for one actor to advise another one, especially when you're not in charge. On the set, I'm never gonna tell another person, "Here's what I think you should do." That's a discussion they should only have with the writers, producers, and directors.
I've always drawn, for example, and I did consider when I was younger, it was either do I become an actor or do I become an animator cartoonist at that point. Do I work at Disneyworld or something and do animated cells or something?
The thing is, that great actors are everywhere. They're everywhere. They're doing good parts on television. They're doing television commercials. They're doing local theater. There are so few opportunities.
Argo might well be studied as a bait-and-switch masterwork: In showing the capture of the American Embassy in Tehran, Ben Affleck first made a fetish of authenticity, then served up a shamelessly Hollywood, and wholly fictional climax, then capped the whole thing off with a coda that was essentially a tribute to his movie's authenticity, complete with side-by-side photos of the actors and their near-identical real-life counterparts. Well done, sir!
Russell Crowe is normally an actor who disappears so far into his characters you'd swear his DNA has been altered.
If young actors ask me things, I always tell them to get on set and watch how it's done. If you can, watch the people that you like, how they work.
Becoming an actor made me way more interested in plot.
Part of being an actor is letting things come about organically as opposed to forcing them.
I don't want to know what happens in any movie that I go to see.
The only problem with Mitch [Pileggi, the actor who plays Skinner] is that his bald head means there's nothing to hold onto when he starts to buck.
Action is pretty boring to do as an actor. Action and sex scenes are silly because it's all faking.
The greatest all-around American film actor is James Stewart.
My father wanted to be an actor, dreamed about being an actor, but he gave it up because my mom and his family told him, "You're never going to make it; it's too tough out there."
My father kind of encouraged me through that. Exactly,[work] not as an actor, obviously, but as someone in show business that had some success. He told me to live the impossible. "Live the impossible!"
One thing I've noticed is that I can tell when a young actor or a young actress is going to become a huge star. Everybody else will say, "Oh come on, Michelle Pfeiffer, are you kidding?" and I'm pretty much always right about that.
I didn't grow up as child actor.
The only thing approaching art in a movie is the script.
Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don't know if you're getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they're in.
